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One of the concessions of all education is that nobody is ever fully-engaged. If you are teaching more than 1 person something, then you are dividing your atten
by talldayo 2y ago
One of the concessions of all education is that nobody is ever fully-engaged. If you are teaching more than 1 person something, then you are dividing your attention between multiple students and hoping they understand well enough to continue. Busywork is even worse; you're just handing kids a set of guidelines and hoping they can intuit the right answer when you grade it.
It feels obvious why phones dominate this environment. If you had a 1:1 teacher/student ratio, nobody would be compelled to distract themselves because the learning is paced for them, not the average of the whole. There's time to catch up on Instagram because roll-call only requires you to answer once. There's time to check Twitter since you finished your test early. The number of places where kids are expected to simply do nothing is absurd - of course they're distracting themselves. I read Treasure Island during my mandatory poetry class, is that a reason to confiscate fiction novels from school premises for their distracting and addicting nature too? The problem is with how we teach.
- banish-m4 2y agoThat doesn't excuse it. Excellence demands the persistent striving for what's difficult rather than surrender. If it means dressing up in a penguin suit or taking up comedy, more power to the teachers who are able to reach students through all manner of cool unreasonableness.
- talldayo 2y agoHere's hoping you're right. I've had some excellent teachers throughout the years, the real rare-odd Bill Nye types with a passion for practical science and tactile learning. Even though I loved their class, the subject matter and most of the content, I was a tired kid. I'd get yelled at for reading books and dozing off because public school is exhausting, and no matter how you cut it it's still 6-7 hours of mandatory education. I'd like to think that mixing enough sugar with the medicine helps it go down for everyone. But I also think it's difficult to make a one-size-fits-all lesson plan for more than 1 person; everyone learns differently, and I don't blame teachers for struggling to discover a teaching methodology that works for everyone. It's a tough problem.
- infinitezest 2y agoIs it really so bad for human brains to just "be" without needing constant distraction? Is it possible that a constant need for distraction is actually contributing to things like ADHD? It seems generally accepted that less distraction is a good thing. And is a novel anywhere close to as addictive and distracting as a magic rectangle that can show you basically anything you want to see at the tap of a screen?
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoIt kind of is. Lectures are mostly boring, engaging lecturers are rare. I was better off practicing problem sets than listening to the teacher, essentially generating my own busy work (but kids are diverse, what worked for one might not for the other). My seven year old get lots of choice time these days in his school. Maybe things are getting better. On the other hand, he finds math too easy, and the only homework he has is what his Saturday Chinese school assigns (daily!).
- infinitezest 2y agoDoing problem sets seems... more useful to a human brain's development than the mere distraction of social media, no? Schooling can definitely be improved (I personally hated school) but that seems like an orthogonal concern to the harma of constant distraction.
- dpig_ 2y agoJust on a hunch I'd have to guess that being-on-phone isn't cleaving the hemispheres of kids' brains apart.
- infinitezest 2y agoI'm not sure who you're arguing with since I didnt make any claims like the one you're refuting. Unless this is a pithy way of asserting (on a hunch) that there is no harm caused by constant distraction (in which case, you should have just said that).